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Comment by 4AoZqrH2fsk5UB | Hacker News Reader

I’m pretty new to crypto in general, but it seems to me that the primary value of it in coming years would be anonymity/privacy.

As I understand it Bitcoin has some problems in this regard, but others have solved it.

I just can’t find it hard to believe we get to 2030 without a way to buy things anonymously online.

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> anonymity/privacy

Nope. Bitcoin and others don't solve this at all. They're a literal permanent ledger of every single transaction you've ever made. Other coins might be better at anonymity, but BTC and its derivatives are certainly not.

Quite easily solved. There are plenty of services that will put your coin through an anonymizer, much like a VPN, or Tor.

There is also coinjoin which is a service that mixes your coins with other participants. I also heard the Lightning network which operates on some kind of application level provides some kind of extra obfuscation.

This is not what anonymity looks like brother. Your IP address is not what links you to your bitcoin. It's your bitcoin address. And since we have a running ledger of all transactions, anyone can write a small script to trace your coins once they know even one of your addresses.

The work around for this is what they call a coin tumbler - it takes your coins and those of say 5 more people, mixes them up real nice by moving them around a couple of wallets in many complicated transactions and then hands them back to a wallet you want from thousands of these mixed up addresses.

Anonymity is not a fundamental human right. Rather it’s a tool that should be available in extreme circumstances. Totally anonymous systems generally devolve over time. Nothing about crypto is inherently anonymous. Bitcoin was never meant to be anonymous. There’s a public ledger... Crypto a la Bitcoin is fundamentally about building distributed consensus. Secure distributed consensus requires strong identity. Whether it’s easy to tie a crypto identity to a social one is simply a matter of time and not a fundamental principle of these systems (except maybe Monero). Behavior can always be analyzed.

i think the value of un-sanctionable funds is high, but only in times of turmoil. Think hong kong and the recent bank account seizures of the protestor organizations. If the financial system is tied to a fairly anonymous crypto, then the gov't cannot seize funds of organizations that oppose it (for better or worse).

There are several larger private chains, including at least one that has a built in decentralized marketplace. But adoption is very low. People may not know they care about private transactions until too late.

In the end, it might depend on a chain becoming popular first before people want to use privacy features on top of it, like using Ernst & Young's Nightfall protocol that's built on top of Ethereum.

Cash is anonymous and private.

Cash is still controlled and regulated by a states. The point of crypto is to have currencies and markets which states cannot control, tax or regulate.

You cannot buy things online with cash, unless you use an intermediary or mail it.

You have a way to buy things anonymously right now, it's called Bitcoin. If you mean a low-fee and frictionless way, it's unclear why that would ever develop. Unless everything you earn and do is anonymous, it seems to me that the transition between the anonymous store of value and your real identity (address, bank acct) will involve friction and cost.

It is fairly trivial to to follow a BTC transaction trail and deduce the owner of a wallet.

Other options such as Monero are better for this.

Bitcoin is not anonymous and is subject to flow analysis. Zcash and monero have solved this in different ways with really intriguing primitives.

ZCash uses zksnarks which are a pseudo homomorphic encryption strategy to hide payments whereas monero is using linkable ring signatures.

Generally speaking, the blockchain community has really advanced the crypto field

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